Tag Archives: walkability

My city of Boulder CO has plans to redesign a portion of a major north-south street in Boulder – Broadway Avenue. As a member of the Boulder Transportation Advisory Board, we periodically receive notes from Boulder citizens about such things as proposed street projects. In the summer of 2017, I responded to a member of Community Cycles – a community-operated bicycle shop who had sent my Board a note. The following is my response…

Dear “Tom” (not his real name),

Thank you for sending this to my Board. As you probably know, I am very supportive of much of what is called for by Community Cycles. In particular, I often call for low-speed street geometries in appropriate (compact, walkable, urban) settings. Smaller turning radii and more narrow street lanes are substantially more effective in inducing low-speed, attentive (ie, safe) car speeds than Warning paint, Warning signs, Warning education, Warning signal lights, and Warning enforcement. These five categories of warnings are the conventional tactics that all US cities – including Boulder – have used for the past century.

And continue to use.

Obviously, this section of Broadway is appropriate for low-speed geometries – and will be even more appropriate when we see more buildings pulled up to the sidewalk on the west side of Broadway.

With regard to that issue, I believe that when more buildings are pulled up to the sidewalk on the west side of Broadway, there will be a substantial increase in pedestrians crossing (or wanting to cross) mid-block, rather than at intersections. To design for that inevitability – and to support the low-speed design we need for this section of north Broadway – the design needs to include raised medians along the street. Raised medians reduce average car speeds, increase motorist attentiveness, substantially shorten pedestrian crossing distances, and promote street beautification. I therefore believe raised medians should be included in the Community Cycles recommendation.

When I proposed that raised medians be installed on North Broadway at the last Board meeting, staff responded by noting that it would be difficult or impossible to install raised medians because this stretch of north Broadway has a lot of delivery vehicles using the continuous left turn lane to make deliveries to businesses. However, I believe it is quite feasible to accommodate both pedestrian safety needs and delivery vehicle needs with raised medians.

For example, raised medians do not need to be continuous throughout the entire stretch of north Broadway. By having, for example, turn pockets interspersed with raised medians, delivery areas are largely maintained. Yes, this will sometimes require a delivery person to have to walk 20 or 30 feet further to make a delivery, but this tradeoff is a relatively minor inconvenience compared to the dramatic pedestrian safety (and other) benefits provided by the raised medians.

Some of my friends in Boulder, Colorado are bothered that a new Google corporation development project in the eastern town center lacks “open space” between the building and the street. I point out in response that Boulder town centers have WAY too much open space (Boulder Junction, for example, has far too much open space). Most of this excessive town center open space is for cars, by the way, but even if such space was for people, it would be inappropriate for a town center.

I’d rather our town centers be like Siena. Why do such people want our town centers to be like Buffalo or Phoenix? Large open spaces are inappropriate in what should be compact, walkable, human-scaled town centers (what new urbanists would call a “transect violation”).

Given this, it would be a terrible mistake if Google had a huge, windswept dead zone open space in front of their building. It would kill walkability and vibrancy.

Similarly, I strongly dislike the dead zone concrete open space “plaza” in front of the new Pearl West building in original Boulder town center. It is another form of deadening. Walkable design principles that reliably deliver vibrancy instruct us that such a space is a dumb thing to do.

But we don’t seem to care much about walkability.

We then scratch our heads when so many drive instead of walk short distances.

If I was in charge, all Boulder town centers would make it illegal to create large (even “green”) open spaces. An occasional hard surface piazza or square would be okay if designed well – which is, of course, HIGHLY unlikely.

Would anyone use the open space in front of Google if they installed such a space? Does anyone use the open space in front of, say, Celestial Seasonings or IBM? Those open spaces make us more like Houston and less like old town Bologna.

Why do we want that???

By pulling their buildings up to the streetside sidewalk (instead of separating the buildings from the street with “open space”), Google will put more people on buses, on sidewalks, and in retail shops.

Those are all WONDERFUL things for urbanism.

Why do we instead want green space in front of buildings that put less people on sidewalks, less people on buses, and less shoppers for smaller retail? Do we want green space in front of Google so it will look nice as we drive by in our cars at 40 mph?

Applying the same land development regulations throughout a community is a surefire way to degrade the quality of walkable urbanism in a town center.

Unless development regulations such as building setbacks and roadway dimensions are calibrated to appropriate locations – larger dimensions in suburbs and smaller dimensions in town centers – a community would need to water down various ordinances to make them palatable to suburban and rural interests.

If there were no clear distinction between urban and suburban regulations (if, instead, regulations were “one size fits all,” as is the case in most cities), it would be nearly impossible to adopt rules that would require sidewalks on both sides of all streets. In rural and suburban areas, this would be seen as less critical, and communities typically must water it down the development rules so that sidewalk installation remains optional citywide.

Another thought: I often lean toward thinking that if a community achieved quality walkable design in its town center, it would eventually stand as a clear indictment of the outlying, lower-quality sprawlsville. I think it would be desirable if sprawl residents started feeling some envy for the urbanism they do not enjoy on their low-density cul-de-sacs. So I like the idea of keeping the quality walkable urbanism in the town center, and accelerating the process of having the outlying suburbia lose its desirability due to the white elephant syndrome.

As an aside, annexation of outlying areas into a city can amplify the corrupting influence of one-size-fits-all suburban values I mention above. When you annex outlying areas, you almost inevitably make your local politics more suburban, since people with suburban values are more likely to live in outlying areas.

In addition, when you annex outlying areas, you tend to be annexing liabilities. You tend to be annexing high public service needs and high auto dependence, coupled with such low-density areas producing relatively low tax revenue that comes nowhere near covering the costs of such development patterns.

I enthusiastically support efforts to design walkable cities, and argue that successfully doing so results in better long-term regional environmental conservation, because designing great cities reduces the desire to flee the city in order to buy a home in remote residential subdivisions in sprawlsville. For this reason, it seems reasonable to me that those strongly seeking environmental conservation should buy into the urban-rural transect concept — the pedestrian/human is the design imperative in the core zone of the transect, and “the trout” (nature) is the design imperative in the rural conservation zone of the transect.

A dilemma here is that water in streams is flowing water — sometimes from the urban zone to the conservation zone. If the water is degraded in the urban zone with its pedestrian imperative, it can degrade the conservation zone when it reaches that zone, thereby harming the trout imperative. Nature often does not respect transect boundaries…

In my humble opinion, we should strive for a middle ground. That is, a stream within the urban zone needs to respect the pedestrian imperative by not creating pedestrian barriers. Yet the stream cannot be significantly degraded to the point of harming outlying conservation zones.

Must urban zone reaches of streams be “piped” or “paved over” to be walkable? Will they inherently suffer from ugly littering and dumping if they are not covered up? I don’t believe so.

Seems to me that a middle ground design would be to leave narrow, vegetated banks along the streams, and include a paved, hard-surface path along side it, as well as fairly closely spaced pedestrian bridges over the creeks (say, every 200 feet, as we often call for such cross-access distances within a block).

By doing so, we achieve at least two things: First, the stream is walkable and does not create meaningful inconveniences to the pedestrian. Second, by establishing a hard-surface path nearby, we encourage a regular flow of pedestrian traffic along the stream. Such pedestrians become “eyes on the stream,” so to speak. They end up providing regular monitoring and voluntary clean-up when littering or dumping occur (or the “pedestrian police” will call city hall and demand that the clean-up be done). Greenways built around the nation have demonstrated the effectiveness of this form of citizen surveillance. A sense of stream/path ownership by path users typically results in clean up of litter problems that has sometimes persisted for decades before the path was installed. The key is that a formerly hidden, neglected stream is now visible to people on a daily basis, which means that we’ve created a chance for knowing about and caring for the stream. “Piping” or “paving over” a stream creates “out of sight, out of mind” problems, not to mention externalities that we would be blissfully unaware of…

Finally, I believe that the urban stream design I recommend above, while not creating a pristine water quality filled with healthy trout, will at least minimize exporting environmentally harmful water to outlying conservation zones.

I am thoroughly convinced that our era of extremely auto-dependent design is a brief, failed, dysfunctional aberration in the course of human history. We are now starting to turn back toward timeless, HUMAN-SCALED, pedestrian-oriented design techniques that worked for several centuries (and remain our most lovable cities — Florence, Siena, Charleston, etc. — cities that will NEVER go out of style). It will ALWAYS make sense for us to design for people instead of cars. The age of huge parking lots and multi-lane roads is a dinosaur age. Either we jettison that mistaken age, or we will lock ourselves into a downwardly spiraling path toward extinction.

Is there a reason that the pedestrian design that has worked so well for thousands of years will one day not make sense? I doubt it, UNLESS the planet is populated only by robotic cars, instead of people.

While there are certain fundamental, timeless design principles, there will also be, within those principles, some shifting about in societal desires. That is why so much of my work focuses on designing for housing and transportation choice. Like in ecosystems, human habitats that are able to adapt to change will better survive than those that cannot adopt to change. The latter are more likely to become extinct.

The car-based design I work so tirelessly against is PRECISELY the kind of approach we need to avoid if we are to adapt to these inevitable changes. We must be able to deal with change on a regular basis. We cannot afford to live in a world where EVERYONE is forced to drive a car and live in suburban, single-family housing. To be able to adapt to change, our communities MUST be designed for transportation and housing choice. Auto-based design does not give us any choices.

Therefore, I am convinced that the most responsible, durable method is for us to select designs that expand our choices, and to draw quite heavily from time-tested designs that have worked for thousands of years — tempered with a dose of pragmatism that incorporates contemporary lifestyle needs.

Adaptability is crucial in the face of such inevitable uncertainty about the future. We need to proceed with caution (and, I might add, with a sense of modesty, rather than the arrogance of, say, modernists, who arrogantly believe we can cavalierly jettison timeless design principles from our past).

The 911 attack on the World Trade Center buildings has influenced a move toward shorter buildings. I am sympathetic, as one of the time-tested design features I am supportive of is the idea that (non-civic) buildings should not exceed 5 stories in height. Above that height, we lose a human scale. For example, it is said that one cannot easily converse with someone on a sidewalk if one is on a balcony higher than five stories.

I think there are certain things we’ve tried in the past that we can say with a fair amount of confidence will NEVER be a good idea. I think that the Triple Convergence demonstrates that road widening will NEVER be a good idea in the future (to solve congestion). Studies in environmental science show that it will NEVER be a good idea to return to an age when we spewed hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Medical science shows that it will NEVER be a good idea for humans to smoke three packs of cigarettes each day.

I say this about nature in cities even though I am an advocate for urban open space.

After all, I have a degree in environmental science, so I understand the importance academically.

When I was a child, the most profound, critically important, priceless experience I had was to be able to play in the neighborhood woodlands. I did that ALL the time. The main inspiration for my becoming a city planner was that I wanted to be in a job in which I could work to see that future generations of kids had that same opportunity, as NOT having that experience would lead to an awful, sterile, barren childhood. Indeed, a study once looked at a HUGE number of variables to determine if there was a correlation between childhood experiences and wanting to conserve the environment as an adult. The study found that there was one variable that stood out head and shoulders above the others. Adult conservationists typically were able to engage in unstructured, unsupervised play in natural areas near their home when they were kids.

Because of the above, I remain a leading advocate for establishing an urban greenway trail systems in cities. Such a system is the only effective way I know of to allow kids (and

adults) to have easy walking/bicycling access to the natural world, on a regular basis, right outside their back door. Nothing is better able to create the army of conservationists our environment needs.

I would therefore hold my strong desire for urban open space up against anyone else with the expectation that my desire would be stronger. I am intensely supportive of URBAN open space.

Note that I say urban open space. This is a crucial qualifier. The urban habitat (in contrast to the suburban and rural) MUST be compact and walkable if it is to be a high quality urban habitat. That means that if we are to introduce nature into the urban world, we must be as careful as if we were planning to introduce human activity into a wildlife habitat.

In the former case, the introduced nature MUST be compact and walkable. In other words, small, vacant woodlots, plazas, squares, piazzas, utility corridors, creek corridors, etc. are perfectly compatible with walkability. One can easily walk from origin A to destination B without an enormous amount of physical exertion. By contrast, putting a golf course or even a 50-acre park in the middle of a city creates an UNwalkable condition, as the distance between A and B becomes too excessive to easily walk (Central Park in NYC can work because NYC has extremely high densities and a quality transit system that means you can easily walk or ride to all of your daily needs along the PERIMETER of the park without having to cross it on foot).

In other words, big open spaces in a lower density community would create unwalkable spaces that would degrade the urban habitat in such cities.

The key for most cities is to preserve and create URBAN open spaces while retaining walkability. Greenway trails that wind their way through neighborhoods and small parks are compatible.

PROXIMITY is crucial as a measure – perhaps reducing all other measures to insignificance by comparison. In nearly all of America, unfortunately, our car-centric history has dispersed destinations to a point where it will be nearly impossible to retrofit walkability into American cities. Tragically, it will require decades or generations before we will see sufficient infill and densification in our communities for any semblance of area-wide walkability to be established.

In addition to lack of proximity, another enormous problem we face in striving to encourage more utilitarian walking (and bicycling and transit use) is that America is drowning in an over-abundance of FREE PARKING. When we know that plenty of free parking awaits us nearly everywhere we need to go, we are essentially being begged to drive a car, and we end up seeing many drive even when their destination is only a short distance away (and even though there may be wide sidewalks and vibrant, pulled-up-to-the-street buildings).

As an aside, the fact that free and abundant parking is so strongly demanded and is such a powerful way to manipulate travel behavior is curious, since for most Americans, there is little that is more anathema than deliberate behavior modification.

It is therefore essential that we work to restrict the availability of free and ample parking. Some strategies: unbundling the price of parking from housing, parking maximums instead of minimums for new construction, market-priced parking, locating the parking on the side or rear of new buildings, etc.

I just returned from a two-week trip in southern Italy and Sicily. It was magnificent, charming, romantic, delicious, boisterous, and invigorating. We visited some of the world’s most walkable cities, and enjoyed the experience of walking in places filled with pedestrians (mostly local, as we were there off-season). We were immersed in a walking culture.

Guess what? Most all of the places we walked had no sidewalk at all (or had “sidewalks” only a meter or so wide). “Pedestrian Level of Service” (called “PLOS”) is an effort to quantify the quality of the walking environment. Is the PLOS high or low in these Italian cities?

I believe so many walk in these wonderful Italian cities because of proximity, the difficulty in finding parking, and the expense of owning and driving a car. Very little (or none) of it is due to wide sidewalks or pleasant landscaping, unlike what many in America seem to think.

I believe that to promote walkability, many Americans call for the installation of wide sidewalks because truly effective strategies (proximity and restrained/priced parking) are too costly, too painful, too long-term, or not seen as realistic in any way at all. So we build sidewalks (sometimes) because we can. It helps many of us pay lip service to providing walkability. And when no one ends up using the sidewalks, skeptics point to them as confirmation that Americans will never be pedestrians in any meaningful way.

In this interim, grim time for pedestrians, we need to encourage compact, human-scaled, parking-restrained, place-making projects that can serve as shining examples of what we need on a broader scale.

We have spent enormous sums of public and private dollars, and several decades, to do all we can to enable car travel. For most of America, there will be no overnight path to walkability.

Indeed, as James Howard Kunstler argues, much of America may not have a future.